Presented as part of the 2025 Head On Photo Festival Open Program, The Bridge and the Maidens – a series of 12 portraits taken in New York by photographer Francesca Magnani depicting the members of ImillaSkate, are currently on display at Paddington’s Love Supreme until 30 November.
Under the arches and between the main pillars of the Manhattan Bridge, in a graffiti-covered park, a group of young women skateboarding wear the pollera, the traditional tiered skirt of Bolivian indigenous women. The vivid clothes stand out against the colourful walls, creating a contrast that evokes different eras and places.
Magnani’s encounter with ImillaSkate is part of the larger project Il ponte blu (The Blue Bridge), a journey across the Manhattan Bridge, with stories of migration, exclusion, and resistance that intersect in the city. Through street portraits, I often tell how the body becomes a tool of struggle and affirmation, challenging colonial gazes and power structures.
In the case of this collective, Huara, Tefi, Belen, Elinor, Brenda, Zusan, Fabi, and Deysi have gained an international following skating with the traditional skirts typical of the Aymara and Quechua indigenous women of the Bolivian Andes.
These garments, symbols of ancestral pride but also social stigma, have long been a cause of discrimination: indigenous women, or cholitas, were mocked for their traditional attire and often excluded from public spaces.
Over the years, the clothing has become a recognized emblem of national identity. Today ImillaSkate reinterpret this image: drawing inspiration from past generations, they proudly embrace their Andean heritage projecting it toward the future.
Just in recent weeks, the young women have been dedicating themselves to fundraising for the construction of a skate park in Cochabamba, their hometown. “We have been practicing for years in improvised spaces, poorly built or dangerous parks. We are promoting a project to build an Olympic, accessible, and dignified skatepark, and a cultural center for vulnerable children and adolescents,” said Huara.
The crossing of our paths in one of my favourite New York stages was almost an apparition for me: like the korai, young women of Greek mythology, their enthusiasm took me back to my early years in New York, and even earlier to reading the Odyssey, with Nausicaa and her companions playing and laughing next to the illustrious shipwrecked traveller sleeping nearby.
I spoke with them several times and Eli wrote me: “Beyond the photos, we want to spread a message of female empowerment and cultural rootedness. Skateboarding teaches us that it doesn’t matter how many times we fall, but that we always get back up.”
Padua-born photographer Francesca Magnani has lived in New York since 1997. Since then, she has told with images and words the stories that strike her, while also documenting her own life.
Her work, exhibited in Italy, France, Canada, Germany, and the United States, is also present in various books including Here is New York (Scalo Verlag, 2002), Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art (Taschen, 2010), and All the time in the world by E.L. Doctorow (Random House, 2011).
Her photographs are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of the City of New York, ICP, Photoville, Aperture Gallery, the Italian Consulate in New York, Women Street Photographers, and the The Brooklyn Public Library. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History acquired Magnani’s images as part of the first core of digital acquisitions related to the pandemic.
Magnani’s stories about New York have appeared in various publications such as Repubblica, D, Il Corriere della Sera, Flair, La Stampa, Il Venerdì, Panorama, Marie Claire, F, Yoga Journal, Artribune, Exibart, TimeOut New York, Il Sole 24 Ore, IL, Vanity Fair Italia, The Art Newspaper.
Magnani moved to New York in 1997 thanks to a Fulbright scholarship in Comparative Literature and taught at NYU and The New School for almost twenty years.
Francesca Magnani: The Bridge and the Maidens
Love Supreme, 180 Oxford Street, Paddington
Exhibition continues to 30 November 2025
For more information, visit: www.headon.org.au for details.
Image: Francesca Magnani, Elinor. LES Skate Park NYC, 2024. From the series The Bridge and the Maidens – courtesy of the Artist ©